Linda Adler-Kassner Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Definitions of Literacy and the Teaching of Basic Writing Linda Adler-Kassner teaches and administers the first-year writing program at Eastern Michigan University, where she works regularly with students called basic writers. She is currently working on a book with Susanmarie Harrington, Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations About Writing and Literacies, which will be published by Hampton Press. With Greg Glau, she is the co-chair of the Conference on Basic Writing and is co-editor of BWe (Basic Writing e-Journal). What do you think are the most important issues facing basic writing teachers today? There are a lot of issues, but they're all linked to one central issue: the current climate for discussions of literacy. The current discussions of "educational standards" perpetuate the idea that literacy is comprised primarily of a set of autonomous and objective strategies (and that these can be measured by a variety of "objective" tests — state tests, placement tests, and so on). Of course, this national climate affects the kinds of discussions it's possible to have about writing and literacy in local institutions. I think it affects the work that we do on a daily basis. For example, even at schools that are able to protect their basic writing programs, they're generally doing so by somehow participating in a discussion about how they're teaching these "objective" strategies to students. Do you see this as threatening the climate for basic writing instruction and administration? I think it's a mistake to see the situation as entirely good or entirely bad. There's a certain tendency to see ourselves as salmon swimming upstream, as fighting the good fight against the oncoming forces of people who don't understand the situations that we work in because they're not in our shoes. That's true, of course — that is, they're not in our shoes. But we're not in theirs, either. I think we do need to find some way to fight the good fight, to protect our programs and our students, to try to shift the terms of local and national discussions about literacy and education, and to do this by working with constituents inside and outside of the academy. I think that, as a field, we've tended to throw up our hands and think that no one outside of the academy and/or our immediate group of contacts can possibly understand our positions (because they're complex, and tied into our experiences in the classroom, and so on). What do you think basic writing teachers/researchers can do to work on these issues? We can do so in our public life, and in our classroom work. Some of the work that we can do can (and should) take place outside of our classrooms. Certainly, participating in discussions about literacy on a local level is really important. For instance, I work in my daughter's classroom every week, and I think that's really crucial. I've managed to organize a special, writing-related project every year, too. A lot of us do things like this, I think, but sometimes we don't think about this work as connected to the larger endeavor of participating in public discussions about literacy. In our own teaching, I also think it's absolutely crucial that we include our students in discussions of these issues, and the best way to do that is through the curricula in our courses. Of course, I think that helping students develop strategies useful for writing in a variety of registers, particularly so-called academic ones, is an important feature of our courses. But to do this without helping students understand the context surrounding those activities doesn't do them much service. I'm not referring here just to what they're learning in our courses, either, but also to the entire institutional/structural mechanisms through which they are placed in those courses. To try to avoid those issues surrounding students' placement in basic writing courses is to hide from them the ideological workings of the very institutions in which, by enrolling, they have indicated (to some degree) that they want to participate. This means creating opportunities in our courses for students to investigate what it means to be in a basic writing course, how they got there, and so on. To not do this to some degree perpetuates the idea that literacy is composed of an objective set of strategies because they are disassociated from the context that they reflect. How has your research in basic writing shaped the curriculum in your own courses? It's been hugely influential, actually. Two years ago, Susanmarie Harrington and I, with several colleagues at our respective institutions, began interviewing students in basic writing courses about their literacy experiences in school and out, their expectations for college writing, and what they thought about writers and writing. These conversations led me to realize that the approach I'd used in my teaching up to that point, which I've come to describe as the "empathy approach," dodged all sorts of issues. The empathy approach is the one where students read material about students with alternative/marginalized educational experiences, and instructors write assignments that invite/allow/require (choose one or more) them to connect their experiences to these other students'. But this approach essentially places the burden of being a basic writer on students (because they have to find connections with these others), and it doesn't help them to understand how the institution has made judgments about their literacies that have some clear consequences (the first of which is being enrolled in a basic writing class). As a representative of the institution doing this sorting, I felt like this approach wasn't fulfilling the obligation that I (or my institution) had to students in basic writing courses. In my redesigned class, through a series of assignments, students develop a sense of their understanding of the purpose of education and literacy, and then work from that to investigate questions or problems related to education and literacy that they define, and which are rooted in their own experience. Then, they create some public document for an audience based on their investigation, or return to that definition of education and literacy to reconceptualize it through their research. I've had students investigate what's valued in placement exams, what high school teachers think students need to be prepared for college and what college teachers think students need to be prepared for college, how basic writing classes are designed and taught by a number of teachers, and other basic writing related questions. This is a pretty challenging basic writing curriculum, of course, but I'm a huge believer in setting this kind of high mark and students have, by and large, done an incredibly fantastic job with their work. Although students sometimes run up against characterizations that they initially don't find flattering, we work through what to do with that. How has your work with basic writing shaped your approach to program administration? In several ways, really. It's certainly made me think hard about issues related to writing placement, and I'm currently wrestling with whether it's possible to design a "just" placement exam without the kind of resources that few colleges and universities have available. Beyond that, though, it's led me to work through issues of curriculum design and work with students in basic writing and first-year composition courses in a more explicit way than I'd done before. Since I work closely with graduate instructors teaching our basic writing course, this is certainly something that we've all considered together. It's also led Susanmarie and me to think jointly about what it means to work with different elements of teaching and administering writing from a non-deficit-based perspective, which is something we'll work to develop practical models for in our next project (along with Dawn Skorczewski).

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